


In Tildes

by amnesiophilia



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-08
Updated: 2013-02-08
Packaged: 2017-11-28 15:15:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/675856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amnesiophilia/pseuds/amnesiophilia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A peek into Kanaya's daily life before the game, and the ways she feels about things - one very difficult thing, in particular.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Tildes

I can give you everything, she thought. Why won't you look at me?

~

It was stitch by stitch, and when you sewed like she did, a stitch was a slow loop encircling a day. You had to be _careful_. It was entirely like topiary. Fabric didn't come from no-where.

It actually came on the back of a chugging, ice-black drone once each sixteen bilunar cycles. The girl stood, her heels in the sand, awaiting the black-blob sight of the drone on the edge of the desert. Heat hazed around its cubish form. The creature - or could be, machine - was a sort of living box with tracked treads, a strange keratin-plated thing that carried food inside itself but did not eat. There were plump fruits, tender fleshy globules embodied by soft fur that tickled the tongue and rubbed on the roof of the mouth. When you bit into them juice spilled as from the lip of a glass.

Kanaya had written those down. You were allowed to requisition a list - choices, some choices, a few though limited choices. Along with the fruits were seven bolts of satin, a folded chiffon wrap, cords of gabardine for curtains and chintzy old corduroy (which was cheap).

You got alone out here. Well, that was the truth. Glass, like an emerald, she could survive in the sun. There were other jades of course, but she was alone here - most of those made their home in buried communes near the grubwarrens, all together, linked at the arms. And this was simply where she had come up out of the earth. A dim memory, her dimmest, was the sudden brightness of light like a pulsing palm pressed over her skull, crumbs of darkness falling away around her temples and the warmth of her body buried in dirt, legs wriggling at it. Before that she could not remember seeing anyone.

She awaited the drone in the waste of the desert. It beeped dissolutely at her, a red light flashing on its front, as its front motion sensor - an eye madly watering - came within range of the red-black-grey-black silhouette with its tell-tale orange cap. A delivery drone, it went by horn patterns to distinguish trolls from rocks. Sand puffed out from the sides of its treads. When it got too choked with grit it would be euthanised and its younger sibling sent instead.

She stamped her foot, and sensing the faint tremor in the earth it trundled to its obedient stop a foot or so away. Her knees bent to open up the box. The barbed, bristly hair - arachnoid, actually, she idly thought - bent flat under her fingers as the top-plate yawed back, and Kanaya gathered in her arms the fabric.

She pulled a long swoop of silk around her neck, and noosing a wide-bottom scarf made it into a heavy sling for bundles of the fruit, pinching up in her fingers the small bosky berries scattered in the corners of the drone's hollow box. Some of them burst and stained at this slight pressure even, and despite herself she licked at the finger-mark juice, feeling the delicious melt of their almost creamy nectar over tongue and fangs. It would stain the silk as she gathered. Well, she could wash it. It would be easy to make the stain come out, even out of white. She sewed slowly anyway. She would not need _this_ bolt, this yard, with the small bright splat of her fruitful fingers on it, until she was near to a finish. So that would be okay, she reassured herself, gathering the shawly sling more securely over widely folded arms, and sprawling her legs bandily to spread the weight turned for the limestone steps up into the cool insulate airiness of her white hive.

The drone's lid flapped shut as it u-turned in the sand, coughing, its eye filled with dust, and headed back through the desert.

~

The heavy pull of her legs up the steps was deliciously slow, and she leant into each movement. As her head came up the stairs into cloth-draped whiteness, the fiesta print of pillows and thin translucent fabric draped from pins, she spared a glance down for the belly board of fruit, which would spill at first onto her couch before she picked up in her hand each piece, felt it - squeezed for its tenderness, heft, and weight - and stowed it one hand by one hand into the narrow clean-white braces of the thermal hull. It had little pods for fruit. They were to her delicacies. She could ration out one a day, and end at just three days without sweetness before her drone came back again. To eat them very cold was best, but there was a sinful hungry loveliness to gobbling just one piece to the pit, still warm from its journey through the desert, as they sat here on the couch waiting to be sorted.

Soon her lips were stained with juice, her gorge thick with richness, and a handkerchief was at them, its trim soft impractical flowers chunky in velvet which she had chopped and stitched herself. It had taken just one week. The handkerchief itself was just a simple strip of cornflower silk, but Kanaya had cut and trimmed it so expertly that it looked like a shape elegant enough to divest the lips not just of stains, but dirty words, inchaste kisses, and breaths in the night. What it mostly did was make them clean and put on a smile. It was slightly marked on the other side with lip-stick stains. On recalling these she coloured, and placed it back upon the sewing table.

Collapsing to the couch in a reverie, feeling the column of her back topple and arch comfortably in the cushions, she took in the view through the window which was the shape of a portrait and opened to the sandy grounds, all of her buried green. The bulby fir of shaped bushes, tall trees with their feet swallowed up in dredge, came through above the sands of the hot season. Forty-four lunar cycles from now, the sand would slowly begin to clear as the storms started, and kicked the dunes through down to the sea. This was a shifting desert. Under it were deep, volcanic rocks, but on top there was just the hot sun and the wind and whatever snatch of peaceful glory you could hold under the point of a pin.

She heard the slow buzz of her Mother Grub's wings as she floated, jaw gently moving to sample the air, pollinating the choked-up stems of the trees from the percolation sac, like a half-empty brown wineskin, on her abdomen. Their branches flourished now, even in this infertility of sand, because Kanaya and her lusus kept neatness here, a sort of order, not _goodness_ exactly, but a continuity of position that defied the desert its triumph. Tomorrow she would don a bracing wicketed suit that kept her from the stings of the spindle flies and, climbing, saw clear the sticks of the dead wood until they fell about her and were covered up, by the thumb of the wind, in sand.

~

I think about you all the time, you know. And - you _should_ know. But you don't, somehow.

~

When she woke it was the creaking night, slow call of birds that bloomed from the unsafe dunes at crack of light to holiday in air. Sometimes you could see thin streamers of silt funnelling off the backs of their wings, as they first flew, in the fading light of dusk. Outsize talons helped them burrow, in the day. A troll's talons fell off in her second sweep but for the four that would slowly sprout into long, articulate limbs. She could no longer dig and burrow then. But she kept that solitary instinct - that progressive pushing, hollowing-out sense, construction-maker. She had fallen asleep on the divan.

Her eyes had the dim pulse of sleep still in them, and she pressed them shut, allowed them slowly to open. The hot season's nights shone by profusion. Each individual star was cloudless, clear and pale, but they speckled the sky so thick it was almost like mosaic. Under their light, through the portrait window, she could see the tree-tops of her garden.

She watched the grounds intently for some time, then. Her eyes roved over the curve of every dune, as if she half-expected to see a figure mapping its half-crouched body to the shape of the sand, climbing it, moving, skulking. When she did not see the figure she so compulsively imagined she felt a deep and pallid yearning in her stomach, and the coldness in her fingertips, the slight pangs of mistimed hunger, became more evident. She rose from the couch.

Diurnal, she felt enveloped in slick cool shadow and divested of the heat she took such pains to blow a breeze through in the day the block seemed spectral. Inside it was sable, but every window admitted starlight, and sheathes of silver paleness broke the dark in strips as she walked around the room, stopped at the head of the staircase.

When she came back from the lavatory her computer was beeping. She tilted up its screen to see a face. Actually it was words: but words meant things, not what they were saying, but just their presence, their association, could bring up a face. These words were spaced out bit by bit. She had seven messages from the girl.

Hello Vriska, she typed. Of course this was when other people were awake.

Finally, replied Vriska, her text that darkish blue that seemed to set against the bluish darkness of the room. What were you, in the bathroom or something?

I Was Asleep, replied Kanaya, just to see how her 'friend' - she thought that was the closest thing, even though it wasn't right - would take it.

What kind of moirail are you anyway, came the quick-fire response, and Kanaya wasn't sure if what she read in it was frustration or just teasing, if you stay up all day long and go to bed whenever I need you?

Weve Talked About This, she typed, maintaining.

Yeah, came the shot back, and we never came to a good conclusion on it anyway. What would I have done if you hadn't woken up, huh? Just twisted in the wind all night? Hey, hope I catch Kanaya tomorrow, I guess! She could be asleep then too though!!!!!!!!

You Didnt Ask About What We Do If I Need You, she entered carefully into the chat client. There was actually a pause now, and Kanaya knew that Vriska was thinking - it made her twist her mouth in self-disdain, but calculating. And then, predictably: Yeah, see, if you need my advice we're both just as screwed! This system is so fucking stupid, fussyfangs. It isn't even how it's supposed to work!

We Could Be Email Moirails, she said. It was a joke. They were in tune enough that they both knew that, and somewhere else, she could imagine that Vriska laughed. 'Lol' came into the chat client, just as true. Then: Seriously though, just wake up at a normal time. Please? What kind of weirdo stays up all day anyway. You're never gonna function in grown-up society like that.

So Obviously You Want Me For Something, she input resolutely, trying to bring Vriska away from her tirade. This would go nowhere, could not go anywhere. What Is It.

And they went into it. It was a long story. Vriska had been sailing on a ship, had drawn a sword, captained deck and tanged salt and made Eridan dance a jig, but now some conflict of property had arisen between them and he was on the upper hand of it. It was a long story, but Kanaya listened. It sounded to her, she told her 'moirail' - again, not right - as though it might be best to let him win, one, just to keep the rivalry alive. Vriska categorically refused, and Kanaya could not blame her, even though she knew that it was good advice. Eventually they came to a plan, bracing and splicing ideas against each other - and Kanaya was cleverer than Vriska, though for different reasons neither of them could have said so - that was sure to bring the fearsome Marquise Mindfang much and outrageous glory. Planks, Vriska sang triumphantly, would be walked.

And then, almost immediately, she signed out. Kanaya closed the laptop, feeling a fine fog in her head that came from experience striking the note of foreknowledge. Every time, she tried. It was so summary! She was not a forward girl, did not staccato and insert giggling signs into her correspondence. She simply tried, in the plainest and most steadfast way possible, to illustrate that she severely cared. Vriska, then, just received her attentions as though water ran over a high rock. It faceted and burst and made brilliant impressions in the sky - but the rock was not softened, and the rock did not become like the water. It never could.

She cast her eyes over the white silk, hung like a drape over the comfortingly large body of the sewing machine. It was like an accusing ghost. At the same time it was something else - the chance, so bare and yet so gossamer, in the cool starlight of this hidden night, the chance, just that - of chrysalis.

So she sewed and sized, she trimmed, for four moons and a day.

~

~


End file.
